The 20 Best Rap Albums of 2016

From the bleak and pitiless nihilism of 21 Savage, Skepta, and Danny Brown to the exuberance of Kamaiyah and Chance; from the gnomic, inward musings of Ka and Kendrick to the rough, open-book humanity of Joey Purp: In 2016, rap albums splintered into a million different and thrilling forms, overflowing the edges of mundane details like normal release dates (hello, Kanye) and heteronormativity (hi, Thug!). If you haven't been glued to Hot 97 or Livemixtapes.com, here, in alphabetical order, are 20 of the most urgent, most partying, most excellent albums to come out of hip-hop this year. No shade to Macklemore.

Savage Mode

If Young Metro doesn’t trust you, the saying goes, Future will shoot you. Using only that logic,21 Savage isMetro Boomin’s perfect companion, because he trusts absolutely no one. Savage Mode is the rapper’s show; even Metro’s beats don’t get in the way, slowly trickling beneath the young Atlanta rapper’s menacingly quiet voice. Everything is grim and intense on Savage Mode—like when he threatens to “Pull up on you, tie your kids up” on “No Heart”—showing that 21 may be the heir to Chief Keef’s hip-hop-nihilist throne. –Matthew Strauss

Lil B.I.G. Pac

As if on cue, just as Gucci Mane was released from prison, his new Florida progeny, Kodak Black, was arrested on a handful of charges, including robbery. Black often evokes Gucci in tone, doling out street wisdom through a sticky Southern drawl, but the trait they seem to share most is an inability to avoid trouble. Black released Lil B.I.G. Pacon his birthday while behind bars, and it’s his best work yet, a thoughtful consideration of his life as a teenage gangster. He’s one of rap’s most impressive young writers—unusually observant, reflective, and prognostic in the same breath—and his punches come in quick succession. His approach on the mixtape is best articulated by Gucci Mane on their collaboration, “Vibin in This Bih”: “Lock me in a box, but I’m coming out swinging.”

Lil B.I.G. Pac is a more concise, well-rounded outing than previous efforts, and it’s also Black’s most complete mixtape to date. It mixes stunt anthems with moving tributes to loved ones on the outside, finding balance somewhere in the middle. The tape is a showcase for the rangy set of tools at his disposal: introspective writing, tough experience, dense word jumbles, heavy emotional impact. As he himself puts it more plainly: “Verbally, mentally, and physically, I keep the heat.” –Sheldon Pearce

Atrocity Exhibition

Danny Brown is both the greatest old-school rapper and the most avant-garde artist in hip-hop.Atrocity Exhibition’s four-track stretch from “Lost” through “White Lines” is about as traditional as rap gets—stuffed with constant similes and marvelously wordy drug descriptions—but it’s backed by unmatched production that other rappers would not dare touch, full of obscure samples and near-impossible tempos. Brown executes this perfectly; Atrocity Exhibition is, in some ways, a continuation ofXXX’s “downward spiral,” just twisted up even more. –Matthew Strauss

Coloring Book

Chance the Rapper’s joyful yelp of a mixtape, Coloring Book, was the panacea we needed all year, a balm to seething societal unrest; it shimmered with the delicacy of a music box and roared with the mightiness of a full gospel choir. No one in 2016 threw a more joyous or life-affirming party of an album, with so many disparate guests sounding like the best versions of themselves: Justin Bieber was here, sounding relaxed and effortless and natural and human, four entirely foreign sensations to Bieber’s music, on the luxuriously sexy “Juke Jam.” Future, deep in his dead-souled zombie phase, sounded cuddly on “Smoke Break.” Regina Spektor turned into a Broadway belter on an axed version of “Same Drugs,” and Jeremih turned into Bon Iver on “Summer Friends.” Chance was the ringleader at the center of it all, inspiring himself and others to reach higher. “Are you ready for your miracle?” went the chorus to “Blessings,” while Chance, cresting, promised ridiculous, impossible things: “I speak of wondrous unfamiliar lessons from childhood/Make you remember how to smile good.” Somehow, he delivered all of it. –Jayson Greene

Islah

Kevin Gates has never shied away from being genuine, even when that means revealing the ugliest things about himself—like when he explained battery charges for kicking a female fan at a show. Among his many strengths as a rapper are his abilities to cut through with blunt talk and to be many things at once, not all of them good: hard and soft, thoughtful and careless, sympathetic and despicable, fatherly and abusive. He’s always been, in spells, an intricate writer, a dynamic performer, and a skilled hookman, with a gravelly voice that somehow lends itself well to all three. But he finds a near-perfect balance on Islah, a somewhat surprising major-label rap hit that is as consistently fragile as it is thorny. He comes off as both emotional and heartless, moving relentlessly through war stories and love stories at the same pace, and often blurring their margins. He’s a gangsta rapper, sure, but he’s also got the chops to cover Blink-182. It’s a technical marvel, an emotional spectacle, and an infectious jammer all in one. –Sheldon Pearce

Honor Killed the Samurai

“Watch me blueprint rec centers,” Brownsville’s Ka mutters on a song just called “$,” from Honor Killed the Samurai. This is the soul of the prematurely wise rapper’s work. Let Rick Ross build “a dream with elevators in it,” let Kanye fly a jet over personal debt; Ka’s dreams are community-sized and grassroots. His hushed, pained devotional music—made of tiny loops and his mutter—has evolved over the years by shrinking at the corners and drawing in on itself. On Honor Killed the Samurai, his Wu-Tang-inspired midnight music came to a fine point, like the graphite tip of a pencil touching pad. For any rap fans who still believe the pen is the sword, Ka is one of the last samurai alive. –Jayson Greene

A Good Night in the Ghetto

Kamaiyah’s A Good Night in the Ghetto crescendos on her buoyant, singsongy phrasings, which are imbued with all the animation of drunken, carefree nights riding across town, dreaming of Beamers with friends. It’s a feel-good mixtape about being young and having fun, about West Coast nightlife as escapism—from violence, pettiness, poverty, and the natural chaos of existence. It finds a median between idealism and realism.

Kamaiyah fantasized about wealth and its feel on her breakout single, “How Does It Feel,” before relishing her come-up on mixtape cuts like “I’m On.” Many of the tracks on A Good Night in the Ghetto, as its title implies, settle somewhere between the two, longing for more but savoring the present. It’s nearly impossible to not root for her, to not celebrate her success with her, as she performs with such gusto, enjoying her newfound fame and her longheld friendships. But she’s clear-eyed, understanding that eventually, the buzz wears off and no amount of money or Hennessy can bring back lost loved ones. “I can’t give a fuck about these millions/And I will give it up to see him live on,” she raps, remembering her late partners-in-crime Cocaine James, who died of cancer in April, and Fred. She balances the breezy with the heartfelt, navigating the complexities of life in Oakland; drinking out the bottle, and pouring some out, too. –Sheldon Pearce

untitled unmastered.

In two TV performances that bookended the release of his opus, To Pimp a Butterfly—the first as the final performer on “The Colbert Report,” the second on “The Tonight Show”—Kendrick Lamar expanded the scope of his vision. The two untitled compositions—both hookless jazz-rap epics with lush instrumental flourishes and improvised-for-TV breakdowns—were clear companion pieces to his masterwork, but they were even more raw somehow, stripped bare of pretext and completely nerve-striking. On Colbert, as he shouted, “Tell ‘em we don’t die, we multiply,” Michael Brown and the magic of black resilience came to mind. Months later, when he roared, “You ain’t gotta tell me that I’m the one,” his supremacy was a forgone conclusion.

These performances weren’t supposed to be properly released, but their energies seemed to required it. They felt like necessary texts. By popular demand, Top Dawg Entertainment put out untitled unmastered, a compilation of outtakes from the TPAB sessions. The assortment of tracks are rough drafts, but the ideas are all clearly articulated, in whiplash-inducing raps and soulful odysseys. You can hear the tinkering, the outtakes informing and enriching TPAB’s final product, but they exist on their own, too, with individual bold arcs and proclamations. Apparently, even Lamar’s B-sides are essential. –Sheldon Pearce

Telefone

Noname is a poet first and a rapper second, a distinction you can feel everywhere on her profoundly intimate Telefone. Her voice is low and conversational, and her lyrics are full of rich, tactile images: “I used to have a name that look like butterflies and Hennessy/I’ll trade it up for happiness but joyful don’t remember me,” she says on “Sunny Duet.” The way her phrases skip across the surface of the light, breezy music shows someone who honed their skills at open mics and spoken-word nights, then saw a way to refract that luminous vision into music. Telefone is a healing and heartbreaking album, but above all it is gentle, full of soft chimes and cooing vocals. Noname is careful with the feelings of others but also unafraid to let a loving hand linger on the darkest and worst that life has to offer: “All my n*ggas is casket pretty/Ain’t no one safe in this happy city,” she sighs, content with her place in the balance between joy and murder, between life and death. –Jayson Greene

iiiDrops

Joey Purp is not a flashy rapper, but a consistent one. iiiDrops opens with a survey of his surroundings on “Morning Sex.” Even with horn blasts reminiscent of Just Blaze, Purp remains level, delivering a steady flow throughout. His mixtape is the work of someone who’s taken in the world around him, and is relaying only the most crucial parts. –Matthew Strauss

Darkest Before Dawn

Pusha’s latest solo record dropped in the waning hours of December 2015, but it hung uneasily throughout the darkness of 2016, from the classic Clipse hauteur (“I drops every blue moon/To separate myself from you kings of the YouTube,” he snapped at the album’s opening) to its dire warnings of storm fronts approaching (“Keep Dealing”). Most affectingly, he offered a diagnosis of the police killings that have trampled our news feeds, one shaky iPhone video at a time. “These ain’t new problems, they just old ways,” he reminded us on “Sunshine.” “The badge is the new noose.”

Pusha found new ways to bring his battle-hardened realism to the front lines. It was a dispiriting year, difficult for optimists, and he was there, eyeing the changing winds and reporting on what he saw. Even with all the dark currents swirling, he put a careful toe on the national stage, campaigning (warily, but hard) for Hillary Clinton. As the husk of “gangsta rap” continues to crumble around him, he finds new ways of engaging with the world without losing his precious skepticism. –Jayson Greene